A friend recently described her six-year-old grandson, dressed up for a special day at kindy, as looking ‘dapper.’
But why ‘dapper’?
Where does that come from?
Well, it’s a very old word—first recorded from around 1440.
It did not exist in Old English or in Middle English.
The Oxford people suggest it came into English towards the end of the Middle English period, apparently adopted from a Germanic word found in Flemish and other Low German dialects.
And since I’ve mentioned them, this is probably as good a place as any to give you a guide to the major periods in the development of English.
What we now call Old English (and used to call Anglo-Saxon) flourished from the 5th to the 11thcentury.
So, it began somewhere in the 400s and changed somewhere in the 1000s.
Middle English is often said to arise from the Norman Conquest in 1066, so it flourished from the late 11th century to the late 15thcentury.
This gradually became Modern English which has flourish from the 1600s to the present day.
I just thought you might like to know that.
Now, back to ‘dapper.’
This means, ‘Neat, trim, smart, spruce in dress or appearance’ (Oxford).
It probably (or should I say ‘possibly’—there’s always doubt around these things) comes from very similar words found in Middle Dutch and Middle Low German.
But the word ‘dapper’ they used meant something more along the lines of ‘powerful, strong, stout, heavy, firm, persevering, energetic, undaunted.’
So, how on earth is it possible to get from that range of meanings to our modern sense of ‘nicely dressed, neat appearance, and (usually) small or thin’?
One doesn’t imply the other, does it?
But the expert linguists are convinced that this is where our word ‘dapper’ comes from.
And if they say that, I am left here scratching my head.
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